The Ship's
list of the George shows immigration 1619 of Dr.
John and Mrs Sarah Woodson. to the Jamestown
Colony. The1622 post-massacre census of
Jamestown shows six black Americans present in their household. Listed
as "Negars", with no names assigned to them, these are 6 of 21 black Americans
total then living in the colony; One more is found among
the post-massacre dead. They hold in their entries the often [incorrectly]
cited historical precedent for black American residence in the new world
footnote
1. What they more likely are is among the group of first
black Americans of known origin in what would become the United
States. Whether or not they were slaves or indentures [as most historians
purport] is the subject of this page.

About
the First Black Americans of known origin & our Woodsons of Jamestown

"I
have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
Samuel Johnson

In1614, in what has
been called the most momentous event of the 17th century, Rolfe's first
shipment of Virginia tobacco was sold in London
39
By
1619 Jamestown was a boomtown, having exported 10 tons of tobacco
to Europe. Success of the cash crop allowed the colonists
to afford two imports which would greatly contribute to their productivity
and quality of life....In 1619 ninety women from England and "twenty
some odd" blacks from Africa were added to the population of Jamestown--both
were paid for in tobacco. The women were "Young maids to make
wives for so many of the former Tenants" and The Virginia Company
dictated they were to be priced at not less than "one hundredth and fiftie
[pounds] of the best leafe Tobacco." The "20 and some odd" blacks were
purchased as indentured servants from a passing Dutch ship blown
off course and in need of food; Its Captain bartered cargo. Although
it appears that all record of the Dutch ship itself is lost leaving
the type of vessel and name of the captain unknown, one will frequently
encounter remarks in which the Dutch boat is called a schooner, other
times a privateer, and in many cases reported as having taken
the slaves from a Spanish ship. There are black persons of early Jamestown
with names as easily Portuguese as Spanish and sometimes more clearly Portuguese
than Spanish- these persons are frequently referred to as having Spanish
names-but Portuguese slave trade was well established and the source referred
to by persons stating the twenty were stolen from a Spanish ship
has not been encountered by me.

It is also
in the year 1619, one year before the pilgrims landed in Massachusetts,
that our earliest direct ancestors so far known on American soil [the Native
American ascendancy purported by our mid 19th century FOWLER /HOWARD ancestors
not yet being revealed in any way] arrived in the form of Dr
John Woodson and his wife Sarah. They arrived on the Ship George in
company of Governor Yeardley. John Woodson apparantly emmigrated
to meet the growing medical needs of the colony, now over 1,000 living
individuals. "On arrival 1619 or shortly afterwards" John Woodson
"bought six of these Africans who were registered in 1623 as part of his
household"40

Historians generally
agree that these black Americans of 1622 were in fact indentured
servants sold into service similarly to white indentures, although some
argue less convincingly that they were de facto slaves, purporting
that although the word had not yet come into use the practice itself had[footnote
2] What is clear is that these persons were unwillingly pressed
into service into a colony unexpectedly receiving them and to which the
human cargo was not originally intended. The choice of how best to describe
them within the society into which they are found can only
come with an understanding of the
census
in which they appear and the treatment in that census in comparison with
both white indentures and the Native Americans also present in its pages,
the
conditions of indentured servitude in general at the time
of the census, the
evolution
of slavery and indenture evidenced in advancing court records,
and the formation of Virginia law relative to both slavery and indenture,
the last study of which yields the only factual evidence of incipient black
slavery. In any scholarly discussion of the history of Black Americans
and/or the history of black slavery, there is the inevitable and rightful
inclusion of these "20 and some odd" first Black Americans mentioned in
John Rolfe's 1619 letter to England for reasons obvious. That
6 appear in the Woodson household forces this discussion to take on special
meaning for those many Americans with the Woodsons among their direct forebears

We have, then,
among our ancestors two early Jamestown settlers presenting 12 years after
its founding, a man and wife intimately tied to the history of
black Americans in the first permanent British colony in America.
That indentured servitude for blacks quickly, if not immediately, differed
from that of whites is evident in the formulation of laws regulating the
status of black children as free or slave dependant on the status of their
mother, the concept of ownership sanctioned by law, etc, all
yet to be determined but occuring in the coming decades at tremendous
disadvantage to the first indentured black servants and their offspring
and all based on the labour intensive and extremely profitable tobacco
trade.

Footnote
one:Virtual Jamestown
informs in their time-line entry for year 1619: " Twenty blacks
are purchased from a passing Portuguese slaveship bound from
Luanda, Angola, to Vera Cruz" 46 and
also states that these persons may not have been the first blackAmericans, since
some 32 Africans were noted five months earlier in a Virginia census of
161947.

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The
1623 Census and how indentures, black or white, and Native Americans are
enumerated therein:

In 1623 Dr John Woodson and his wife Sarah
had included in their household 6 persons entered as žNegarÓ and without
name. On that census, in other households, there appear other žNegarsÓ
who are sometimes listed with their forenames, but as often not. The white
indentures in other households are called žservantsÓ , mostly unnamed.
Similar to the black Americans in that census, the white servants are occasionally
given first names. Sex is often not addressed for either white or
black indentures when their names are not given. In that census [
which includes 21 living žNegarsÓ and one likewise mentioned on the death
list for the colony] are also žIndiansÓ who are sometimes unnamed, and
who occasionally have forenames as well, and when not given names, their
sex is not addressed. Again, the inclusion of name, if given, seems
based on whim and / or the info made available to the census taker. Native
Americans were the first to suffer slavery, and the status of these Indians
is not clear in that census. The first " 20 and some odd" Black Americans
present in the American Colonies were bartered, according to John Rolfe,
by a Dutch Sea Captain in need of žVictualsÓ. The 20 had names, some
English, some Spanish or Portuguese. Most agree that this Dutch Skipper
came directly from the coast of Africa but questions of their
point of origin will never likely be answered; Both the Skipper's name,
and that of his boat, have been lost to history.

The racially defined slavery of Black
by White first begins to be legally formulated in the 1640s-60s, the period
from 1620 to that time notably brief , causing Black Indenture to appear
fragile and tentative in light of a rapidly advancing racial disparity
at first not entirely evident . Although the word žNegarÓ in the census
could cause discomfort based on our modern understanding of the historical
use of the word, at that time the word did not carry the negative
implications implied in its later use. Differentiation in the census of
Jamestown for Irish also existed , and it would appear these entries, Indian,
Negar, Servant, were to seperate the English self sufficient classes from
the others present in the colony. See 1623
Muster Role

The
worst [one would hope] scenario conditions of early indenture in
Jamestown is best described by a white indentured man of Marin's Hundred
, Richard Frethorne, in his letter
home to England written exactly in 1623.His letter includes the request that
his parents send money to buy his freedom or send food to sustain him,
describing a pitiful condition no better than slavery and remarkable in
its extremes.

Indenture
and the treatment of black and white indentures in the Virginia Court system;The legal dispute of a slave with his
owner, a descendant of one of the original "20 and some odd":

For a brief period in early American
history, all indentured servants, whether black or white, went on to gain
their freedom and purchase land, and sometimes then procured indentured
servants for themselves, including the black former indentures buying at
times white indentures. What is evident is that there quickly came
a time when black indentures were treated differently than white
indentures in the legal system, and these appear the first evidence
of systematic seperation of bartered blacks into a slave system. Two important
legal cases are important to this study: one in 1640 and the next, in 1655.
The circumstances in the two cases differ, one being a punishment for the
running away from the duty of indenture and thus punished to the awful
extension of served years to permanent life indenture, while the 2nd
is a clear legal precedent establishing the right of one person to
own another for life based on the contract of sale, litigated in court
with the two parties in question facing each other in that venue. But the
first case, in 1640, stands out sadly for the legal disparity in punishment
allotment; Fleeing a Virginia plantation, two white and one
black indentured servant were caught and returned to their owner, two had
their servitude extended four years. The third, a black man named John
Punch, was sentenced to "serve his said master or his assigns for the time
of his natural life."42

The first account of legal dispute of indenture
vs. slavery is found in 1655 when the Va courts found for the holder.
žFrom evidence found in the earliest legal documents extant, it is Anthony
Johnson who we now must recognize as the nation's first slaveholder. After
all, the court battle he eventually won in 1655 to keep John Casor (Ceasar?)
as his servant for life, identifies this unfortunate soul as the first
slave in the recorded history of our country. Claiming that he had been
imported as an indentured servant, Casor attempted to transfer what he
argued was his remaining time of service to Robert Parker, a white, but
Johnson insisted that "hee had ye Negro for his life".The court ruled that "seriously consideringe
and maturely weighing the premisses, doe fynde that the saide Mr. Robert
Parker most unjustly keepeth the said Negro from Anthony Johnson his master....It
is therefore the Judgement of the Court and ordered That the said John
Casor Negro forthwith returne unto the service of the said master Anthony
Johnson, And that mr. Robert Parker make payment of all charges in the
suit."43The sadly ironic aspect of this
ligation is that Anthony Johnson himself is felt likely one
of those first indentured servants sold at Jamestown, having gained his
freedom, bought lands, and bought hands to work it. It has then in its
construct economic and class consideration, yet , it was to have
far reaching racial effects.

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Robert McColley: žThe legend has been repeated
endlessly that the first blacks in Virginia were "indentured servants,"
but there is no hint of this in the records. The legend grew up because
the word slave did not appear in Virginia records until 1656 [sic, see
laws of Va regarding slavery in link below where the word appears earlier]
, and statutes defining the status of blacks began to appear casually in
the 1660s. The inference was then made that blacks called servants must
have had approximately the same status as white indentured servants. Such
reasoning failed to notice that Englishmen, in the early seventeenth century,
used the word servant when they meant slave in our sense, and, indeed,
white Southerners invariably used servant until 1865 and beyond. Slave
entered the Southern vocabulary as a technical word in trade, law and politics.
(Robert McColley in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, Edited by Randall
M. Miller and John David Smith, Greenwood Press, 1988 pp 281) ž44

"The popular conception
of a racial-based slave system did not develop until the 1680's. (A Brief
History of Jamestown, The Association for the Preservation of Virginia
Antiquities, Richmond, VA 23220, email: apva@apva.org, Web published February,
2000)40 ..the first twenty "Negar"
slaves had arrived from the West Indies in a Dutch vessel and were sold
to the governor and a merchant in Jamestown in late August of 1619, as
reported by John Rolfe to John Smith back in London. (Robinson, Donald
L. Slavery and the Structure of American Politics, 1765 - 1820. NY: Harcourt,
Brace Jovanovich, 1971) By 1625, ten slaves were listed in the first census
of Jamestown. The first public slave auction of 23 individuals, disgracefully,
was held in Jamestown square itself in 1638. What were to become the parameters
and properties of the 'peculiar institution' were defined in the Virginia
General Assembly from about 1640 onwards. Negro indenture, then, appears
to have been no more than a legal fiction of brief duration in Virginia."
40

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Jamestown
Laws:Regarding
Indentured Servants [Virtual Jamestown]Shows laws regulating both servant
and master, and finally a law involving White and Black indentures
and the ability of Christian Free Blacks to buy Christians of any race
is curtailed while that of the Whites is not. This law dates to October
1670Regarding
Slavery [Virtual Jamestown]These laws give great insight over
a great period of time . The word slave appears in the first instance that
I can find within these pages in the laws of 1660/1 and included
is mention of Indians sold for life. This appears to show not the
time frame of the first slaves but the period in time in which the
institution was legally defined and the governing body involved in
attempting to protect it.Africans
in Court Court decisions that reflect the concept of indenture,
and the advancing practice of slaveryLaws
Pertaining to Slaves and Servants, Virginia 1629-1672 ["From William
Waller Hening, editor. The statutes at large; being a collection of all
the laws of Virginia, from the first session of the Legislature in the
year 1619, vol. 1. New York: Printed for the editor, 1819-23."]

Slaves
and The Courts 1740-1860 [From the American Memory Collection of the
Library of Congress and searchable by keyword. "contains just over a hundred
pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult
and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the
American colonies and the United States. The documents, most from the Law
Library and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library
of Congress, comprise an assortment of trials and cases, reports, arguments,
accounts, examinations of cases and decisions, proceedings, journals, a
letter, and other works of historical importance"]Africans
in America A Gateway to an extensive and informative PBS
mounted site"Stowage
of the British Slave Shipe Brookes," ca. 1790[describes the
terrible and horrifying conditions on board but improved over the period
before regulation of conditions for transport when this same ship carried
many more. From Virtual Jamestown]Account
of the Middle Passage from "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano"Slavery:
Lest we Forget
Website provides Links to some remarkable
itemsStudies
in the New World of Slavery, Abolition and Emmancipation
An ongoing website best described in its preface:
žStudies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (ISSN:
1090-6231) is an occasional publication featuring essays, documents, images,
bibliographies and database information relevant to the history of
slavery, abolition, and emancipation. The journal is intended to provide
a global context for slave studies. The project is intended also
to link scholars in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Although the
project's primary means of dissemination is electronic, printed copies
can be made available to scholars and libraries that lack access to the
Internet. žThis Site also has an excellent
links
pageAmerican
Legacy A scholarly and interesting magazine available in part
online and presenting articles detailing the history
of black Americans.African
American Odyssey [From the American Memory Collection of the Library
of Congress and including many useful links to specific collections themselves
searchable by keyword]

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Sources for this Page [The
first Black Americans & the Woodsons]Back to Top
of Page

Sources1. Jamestown
laws Regarding Indentured Servants Shows laws regulating both
servant and master, and finally a law involving White and Black indentures
and the ability of Christian Free Blacks to buy Christians of any race
is curtailed while that of the Whites is not. This law dates to October
16702,Jamestown
laws Regarding
SlaveryThese laws give
great insight over a great period of time . The word slave appears in the
first instance that I can find within these pages in the laws of
1660/1 and included is mention of Indians sold for life. This appears
to show not the time frame of the first slaves but the period in
time in which the institution was legally defined and the governing
body involved in attempting to protect it.3. Africans
in Court Court decisions that reflect the concept of indenture,
and the advancing practice of slavery4. Servants
and Slaves as Seen Through Runaway Advertisements39.
žA Brief History of Jamestown, Virginia,Ó http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SocialConstruction/Jamestown.html.40.
žChronology on the
History of Slavery and Racism,Ó Citation information and credit: Chronology
on the History of Slavery, Compiled by Eddie Becker 1999,, http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html.42.
The Terrible Transformation.
From
Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery . Part of the PBS webpages entitled
Africans in America.43.
The
Blurred Racial Lines of Famous Families. Part of the PBS webpages.
Researched and Written by Mario de Valdes y Cocom.44.
Citation to Book and Author as given from Chronology
on the History of Slavery and Racism. Website mounted by Eddie Becker.45.
Frank Willing Leach. Pleasants Family . Philadelphia, PN: The Historical
Publication Society, 1939.46.
Virtual
Jamestown Timeline [ " Jamestown Timeline, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia
Center for Digital History, University of Virginia ]47.
Virtual
Jamestown Timeline entry for 1619 which states in part for 1618
"August: Twenty blacks are purchased from a passing Portuguese slave ship
bound from Luanda, Angola, to Vera Cruz. They may not have been the first,
since some 32 Africans were noted five months earlier in a Virginia census
of 1619." Jamestown Timeline, Virtual Jamestown, Virginia Center
for Digital History, University of Virginia ]

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